Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back At the Other Kind of Virus
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
this talk about virii reminds me of a a mail I got once...
this is the manual virus, based on the code of honour.
for every of your disk drive
for every folder
delete contents
type the following, in capitals: you've been owned :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
http://www.pcauthority.com.au is 404 already?
Is the old floppy-to-floppy style of virus nearing extinction, or will poisoned bittorrent files breathe new life into this kind of chicanery?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
Slashdotted, get the Coral cached version: http://www.pcauthority.com.au.nyud.net/News/143993,top-ten-worst-viruses.aspx
At last, an article from a major outlet that doesn't break up into ten seperate pages, one for each item, all in hopes of getting more page/ad views. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Computer malware dont kill y
after #3. MyDoom, there's no jump, no next page, just the copy right notice, am i missing something?
Anywho, these viruses remind me of a kinder, gentler time when lemonade was real and the danger wasn't, when we had to boot our machines up hill, both ways in the snow, and yada yada yada. Good piece of nostalgia, but I'd be interested to see #2 and #1.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
back in the heydey of isca bbs, back in the mid-90s, there was a virus going around and if you got it it would install itself and monitor your iscabbs activity. if you got an IM with a certain codeword (which i will not type) from a fat chick, you would sleep with her. i got hit with it and it was the best worst month of my life.
Creeper and Brain put themselves at the head of the list.
Fortunately, Reaper came in and fixed it up but botched the job, truncating the list after the 10th entry.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Code Red wreaked havoc on the routers at the place I was working for back in 2001. That was the virus that caused ISP's to block the ports for all those peronal web servers running for no reason. Well the ISP's relised that they could cut thier traffic in half by leaving the ports blocked permanently. The virus allowed an infected machine to receive remote commands via IE cgi commands. You could check the router log to see who was infected, connect to the IP with IE and read and write to thier hard drive. The virus was named by the security team that found it, they were drinking Mountain Dew Code Red at the time.
My girlfriend told me i got herpies from using her laptop
The real worry is that a computer virus will make the leap into the human population.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
ran into this one the other day and it was pretty bad, apparently it has been around awhile but this was the first time i saw it.
lose != loose
The first I heard about nimda was one of the senior engineers in our company telling me to scan my PC and let him know if anything showed up. The only thing that did was a java script trojan dropper which was relatively harmless, but by the time I'd finished everyone was sitting around waiting for the company network to be given the all clear.
Nimda seemed to show a preference for hitting file servers. Even though my machine was clear at the start, I was just checking through a shared folder and *bam*, as soon as the mouse moved across a file called readme.txt.js (The final extension was hidden, but this didn't make any difference.) a tftp connection was opened to the host, and fortunately the antivirus had been updated by that time, and so stopped it. The preview bug that caused this was a zero day.
I was on a win98 box at the time, some people on unpatched NT machines fared worse (Yeah yeah, I know patch or die.. but the company I was at didn't take endpoint security seriously, it was a wake up call to the IT department, this was the first and last worm to really own our network.) they got hit by the worm like behaviour, from directory traversal attacks with no assistance from the user needed. Nimda shut us down for days, during the first few all clears our antivirus provider was still learning all the attack vectors, so it kept coming back.
I'd like to throw a few bricks at Symantec over this, but it was a shocking learning experience for more than just them. I doubt another event like this will happen on well managed networks.. It will just be the odd trojan leaking information and joining a botnet. Or maybe some idiot connecting his personal modem behind the firewall, but I can only hope not.
In SOVIET RUSSIA the hot grits profit you!
I get the strange impression that the authors aren't terribly clear on the difference between an Apple II and a modern Mac.
I'm recalling this from the late 90's. It was a virus that was supposed to make it impossible for office workers to use their computers from 6 AM to 10 AM, and encourage them to listen to Howard Stern instead.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
They have two honorable mentions, then count down from 10 to 3.
Where the hell are #2 and #1?
I dispute the reporter's claim that the Elk Cloner virus, which I have never heard of, was a "serious problem" on the Apple II, and that it copied itself onto "the boot sector". The boot sector of an Apple II disk was 256 bytes, insufficient for both fulfilling the normal task of a boot sector and also containing a functional computer virus.
Well, virus is not really the proper word for most of what is infecting people anymore. It's malware, spyware, and trojans.
However, you design a destructive virus to hit public infrastructures and medical facilities and it might as serious or more than a biological virus.
It made me instantly think of this strip.
There's nothing like $HOME
Great drug minimal side effects.
In the abscense of #1 and #2 I'll nominate some:
1) Michelangelo
Back in the MS-DOS days this virus caused a scare at my workplace, on Michelangelo's birthday we were given directive to shut down our computers...my first experience with Virus hype...
2) Good Times Virus
Well ok not a virus, but I remember having to explain to my dad what a Virus hoax was for hours...ugggh...
...in bed
Do we have to subscribe somewhere to find out what #2 and #1 are ?
How about a top 10 list of websites who are hopeless at compiling top 10 lists.
Honourable Mention - Underpants Gnomes
#10 PCAuthority
#2 ???
#1 Profit !!!
Only in slashdot-land does a first post get modded as "Redundant"
Only in slashdot-land does a first post get modded as "Redundant"
Honest question: how many other places can someone be modded redundant for anything? I don't browse a lot of forums, but it doesn't seem too common.
Top Ten Medical Breakthroughs Of All Time:
It's OK... I understand. I got modded redundant because "swine flu" was actually mentioned in TFA, which I didn't read.
So, although I was just joking, it was a redundant joke.
I wish I had said something witty like "frist post"
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Parent is full of shit.
That is, if you have an 8th grade understanding of English.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
As an example, a post that says nothing but, "Hey, guys, a list of the top ten viruses!" would be redundant, even if nobody else posted anything like it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Parent is spam link.
After reading your post, I got infected by your virus, but fortunately I am safe, because I am running Li JK%$#%43543535435j43kjkl ***NO CARRIER***
Lists ends at 3. Probably ILoveYou and NetSky (though Bugbear was also popular in it's days) were meant to be on 1 and 2.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
http://www.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2000-121517-4539-99&tabid=2
Redundant because the summary basically said the same thing? D'oh!
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
"This one is different and much more troubling, since it harms not just our company, but also damages the systems and productivity of a large number of other companies and organizations around the world. The perpetrator of this virus is attacking SCO, but hurting many others at the same time"
"There are computers with incorrect clock settings that may already be firing off an attack," against SCO's site"
Curiously enough SCOs site was hit before the virus was set to trigger and a company Centershift based in the same co-location facility was hit at the same time and/or were having contemporaneous problems with the same hosting company. And iirc the DNS record for www.sco.com briefly disappeared at the time.
davecb5620@gmail.com
I noticed the article didn't say anything about how Cornflicker's C&C code was far more advanced than the previous ones. Just whinged about how much of a let down the "OMG ITS GONNA CALL BACK IN FOR MORE INSTRUCTIONS!!" date was.
Whereas some of the old botnets could be reverse-engineered and the website names it reports to further down the line could be registered and "stolen" from the actual botnet operator, this one added a good deal more security to the mix.
Man, Generic.dx!bm easily was the most terrible virus in existence. Sometimes I still wake up at night, having had a nightmare about Generic.dx!bm.
They really should make Generic.dx!bm their number one, for its sheer awfulness.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Rich Skrenta turned out to be a pretty good hacker, turning out a precursor to MUSHes called VMS Monster. Unfortunately, it was as destructive to college students' grades as Elk Cloner was to Apple ][. I'm running a copy on my own site.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
OK, we've now fixed it
Given that this story was posted to Slashdot my first thought was that it was about human-infecting viruses. They are the "other kind" of virus on a tech-focused site.